A father-and-son team toting long-barelled guns shot and killed 15 people including a 10-year-old girl at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, authorities said Monday, labelling it an antisemitic terrorist attack on a Jewish festival.
The shooting at Australia’s most famous surf beach on a blue-skied Sunday sent waves of panic through terrified crowds at a tourist hotspot that encapsulates the country’s love of the sea.
The youngest victim was a 10-year-old girl who died in a children’s hospital, police said. The oldest was 87.
Another 42 people were hospitalised, including two police officers.
The morning after the killing, a grassy hill overlooking Bondi Beach was still strewn with discarded items from people fleeing, including a camping table and blankets, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
People gathered other belongings including flip flops, sneakers, and thermos flasks and lined them up in the sand for collection.
The gunmen targeted an annual celebration that drew more than 1,000 people to the beach to mark the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
The killings sparked global condemnation.
Australia is mourning the dead by flying flags at half-mast Monday, said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who laid flowers at the entrance to Bondi Pavilion on the beach.
– ‘Pure evil’ –
“What we saw yesterday was an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism, an act of terrorism on our shores in an iconic Australian location, Bondi Beach, that is associated with joy, associated with families gathering, associated with celebrations,” Albanese told a news conference.
“It is forever tarnished by what has occurred last evening.”
Police said the 50-year-old father had six licensed firearms, which they believed were used in the shooting.
His 24-year-old son was in hospital with critical injuries.
Officers raided two properties in Sydney, police said, reportedly the homes of the two gunmen.
“We want to get to the bottom of this. We want to understand the motives behind it. And we certainly want to understand the actions that have happened,” New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon said.
World leaders and governments expressed revulsion and condemnation of the shooting, including in the United States where President Donald Trump said it was a “purely antisemitic attack”.
– ‘Antisemitism is a cancer’ –
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Australia’s government of “pouring oil on the fire of antisemitism” in the period leading up to the shooting.
“Antisemitism is a cancer that spreads when leaders are silent and do not act,” he said in a televised address in southern Israel.
Australian police said they were deploying their forces in Sydney to ensure a “highly visible” presence in Jewish communities and at Jewish places of worship.
Authorities have declared the shooting a “terrorist incident”.
Rabbi Mendel Kastel, who runs crisis counselling centre Jewish House, said his brother-in-law was killed in the attack.
“I already knew that he had passed. I was together with his children. They didn’t know at the time, so we needed to really hold together for them,” Kastel said.
“It’s unbelievable that this has happened here in Australia, but we need to hold strong. This is not the Australia that we know. This is not the Australia that we want.”
– ‘Everybody ran’ –
Tales of terror and heroism are still emerging from the mass shooting.
Footage on social media showed a man identified by local media as 43-year-old fruit seller Ahmed al Ahmed grabbing one of the gunmen as he fired on people who were out of view of the recording.
The man then wrestles the gun out of the attacker’s hand, before pointing the weapon at the assailant who backs away.
Frenchman Alban Baton, 23, said he hid for several hours with other customers in the cool room of a Bondi Beach grocery store when the gunfire broke out.
“It was very fast,” he told AFP at the beach early Monday.
“One girl said: ‘There is one guy with a gun’. And from this moment, everybody ran, and it was like survival instinct, so we all run in the cool room,” he said.
“Minute after minutes, we were starting to realize what was happening.”
– Antisemitism –
The foreign ministry in Iran, which has supported the Palestinian militant group Hamas for years, denounced Sunday’s “violent attack in Sydney.”
A string of antisemitic attacks has spread fear among Jewish communities in Australia following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
The Australian government has accused Iran of being behind two of the attacks, and expelled Tehran’s ambassador nearly four months ago.
Tehran directed the torching of a kosher cafe in Sydney’s Bondi suburb in October 2024, and a major arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December 2024, the prime minister said in August, citing intelligence findings.
No injuries were reported in the two attacks.
In April 2024, a knife-wielding assailant killed six people at a shopping centre not far from Bondi Beach. The killer was found to have been suffering from schizophrenia but had stopped taking his medication, and no clear motive was identified.
djw-sft/mlm
